I swallow hard. “I don’t know.”
Miller shrugs, swirling the last of her wine in her glass. “And maybe he won’t care. Maybe he won’t have any desire to know Boone. But that should behischoice, not yours.”
I lean my head back against the couch again, closing my eyes. The wine is hitting harder now, a warmth settling in my limbs, loosening the last bit of resistance I have left. I don’t want to admit it, but she’s right. It should be Hudson’s choice.
I just don’t know if I’m ready to face what happens after.
Miller glances at her phone and stands, pressing a kiss to the top of my head like she used to back when we were kids sneaking into each other’s bedrooms to talk about boys and the latest high school gossip. “I gotta run.”
I crack one eye open. “Where are you going at—” I check the time. “—twelve-thirty in the morning?”
She grins, grabbing her bag. Designer, of course. “Remember that hot guy from the farmer’s market last month?”
I squint at her. “You gave some random man my address at midnight?”
She rolls her eyes. “Of course not. I gave him the address of the house down the street.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “You’re a menace.”
She grins. “You love me.”
“Jury’s still out.”
“You’re going to be okay, you know,” she says, more serious this time. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
I nod, but I don’t feel convinced. I watch the door click shut behind her, the quiet settling around me like a blanket. I don’t know what I’d do without Miller.
She’s been showing up for me since the second I told her I was pregnant—and not in some big, dramatic way either. In quiet, relentless ways. InMillerways.
When I was twenty, working back-to-back shifts, running on three hours of sleep and half a granola bar, she’d let herself into my apartment on Saturday mornings like she paid rent. No knock. No text. Just her, a giant iced coffee in one hand and Hudson in the other before I could even blink. She’d order takeout, fold my laundry, wipe down my counters while complaining about the state of my fridge—and she never cooked. Still doesn’t. Miller treats DoorDash like oxygen. If the app ever crashed, she’d simply cease to exist.
And that’s the thing about Miller. She hates children. Loathes anything that even hints at domestic responsibility. She’s the woman who said she’d rather serve time in federal prison than change a diaper and meant it. The kind of person who side-eyes babies on planes and visibly recoils if a child sneezes in her vicinity.
And caretaking? It’s about as far from her natural inclinations as the moon. Yet, when Hudson was a tiny, inconsolable storm of colic, it was Miller who held him for hours. She walked the floor in the dead of night.She’d hum tuneless melodies, her brow furrowed in concentration, a fierce protectiveness etched on her face.
And in the blurry aftermath of sleepless nights and overwhelming days, when I’d find myself down on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, a raw, unraveling mess of doubt and tears, Miller was always there. She never offered platitudes or easy answers—just a quiet, unwavering solidarity that whispered,you are not navigating this alone.
Miller doesn’t inherently love the sticky fingers or the endless demands of motherhood. But her love forme—and by extension, for this small, demanding human who has irrevocably changed my world—is a force of its own; a quiet, steadfast current that flows beneath the surface of her sharp edges.
And even though she’ll never admit it, she’s been taking care of us in her own weird, Miller way ever since. She’s trying to do that now, but I just don’t know what to do with it.
IfBoone wanted Hudson on the weekends, where would they even go? The ranch? Boone worked the ranch—at least, he used to. And if he does, would Hudson be left with Molly? But Molly probably works the ranch too, especially since Lane’s been gone.
Lane.
I should’ve gone to his funeral.
It still gnaws at me, the fact that I didn’t.
I told myself it was because I was too busy, because I had the diner to run, because I had Hudson. But the truth is, I was just scared.
Lane and I were never particularly close. He wasn’t particularly close toanyoneexcept Molly. But he did a lot for my dad, for me. He gave my dad a job when he needed one. A good job. One that paid our bills and then some. And he let me run around that ranch like I belonged there because he knew Harvey didn’t have many other options for childcare besides Alice, who had her hands full with the diner.
Lane wasn’t a man who made things easy. He rarely showed his love outright, but sometimes—sometimes—he’d slide me a peppermint candy when no one was looking. He’d let me sit on the fence while he trained ahorse, even though I was probably in the way. And once, when I broke my wrist falling off a hay bale, he drove me to the hospital himself, grumbling under his breath about how I needed towatch where the hell I was goingbut buying me a burger and a milkshake on the way home anyway.
I try to make sense of the thoughts swirling in my head, but they’re tangled up in the wine and the exhaustion, and honestly? I’m too tired to untangle them now.
Instead, I burrow deeper into the couch, tugging a throw blanket tight around my shoulders. I’d splurged on this couch last year, justified it as a necessity because Hudson was getting bigger and we needed more space to sprawl out on movie nights. He still was getting too tall too fast, and really, I’d bought it for nights like this. Nights where I was too lazy to drag myself upstairs, too tired to face my own bed, too overwhelmed to do anything but sink into the cushions and pretend the world wasn’t waiting for me in the morning.
